…and the house he shares with his people.

Unexpected updates: the death of a dishwasher

We hadn’t planned on doing a whole lot with the inside of the house this summer – we spent a lot of time painting over the winter, and have plans for the coming winter – but the warm months only last so long, and we’d rather spend them outside.

Our dishwasher, however, called our attention back into the kitchen.

It looks so innocent...

As dishwasher debacles go, ours was pleasantly undramatic. I turned the dishwasher on to run Friday morning before I left for work, and noticed it was making some odd noises. It wasn’t leaking (in the kitchen or the basement), though, so I didn’t worry about it. When I got home, though, there was about 2″ of water in the bottom of the dishwasher, and the dishes were still dirty. We tried it a few more times, checked all the spaces, intakes, jets, etc. that we could reach, and made sure there was no food or hard water deposits visibly blocking anything. We tried vinegar in case there were hard water deposits that we couldn’t see. We finally came to the conclusion that the dishwasher was still capable of drawing water in, and of draining (good!) on the drain cycle, but the pump was failing to draw the water up into the jets in the bottom or top of the dishwasher to clean the dishes. It was still trying, and shaking the floor in the process, but it was the little pump that couldn’t.

Since the people who sold us our house were nothing if not terrifically organized, we had the receipt for the dishwasher (purchased April 2001) and the user’s manual with model number. We called Kitchen Aid for their advice — they ran us through their diagnostics, and came up with the super helpful “we have no idea what it could be – but we can arrange a service call…” for about $75 a pop.

We decided that $75 (just for the visit; not counting parts) would not be well spent on an 8 year old, relatively inexpensive dishwasher that Kitchen Aid couldn’t even fathom a guess at what might be wrong. Aside from that, we decided when we bought the fridge (the only appliance that didn’t come with the house) that we wanted to go with stainless steel, even though the rest of the appliances were white. We decided that as the others needed replacing, we’d complete the switch to stainless. All of that added up to us spending Kentucky Derby Day at the appliance store.

The new baby is coming home on Thursday. We decided on the new Kitchen Aid Superba series dishwasher. We also looked into Bosch, but there were a few advantages to the Kitchen Aid. It was ever so slightly quieter, the racks move a little more smoothly, it offers the 3rd cutlery rack on top, and it’s slightly wider. Standard dishwasher cutouts are 24″ wide, and American dishwashers are made to that standard. European dishwashers are just slightly narrower, which drops your capacity just a smidge (by one dinner plate?), and requires spacers in the cutout in installation. Plus, the KA was on sale, and it will match our Kitchen Aid fridge exactly. The appliance-by-appliance transition to stainless steel is underway.

Most importantly, though, it will put an end to this hand-washing-everything nonsense. Naturally, when the dishwasher died, it was as full as was humanly possible to achieve. It was a long morning at the sink on Saturday…